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"The fruits of our religion': Benjamin Whichcote on Transfiguration

In a recent tweet, theologian John Milbank referred to John Colet (d.1519), the humanist scholar and Dean of St Paul's, saying "We need his spirit now. Christian Platonism. So crucial to Anglican tradition".  My response was to post a picture of Benjamin Whichcote, a reminder of how the Cambridge Platonists ensured that this tradition of thought continued in the reformed Church of England.  Milbank recognised this with his reply "the candle of the Lord", a reference to the characteristic motif of the Cambridge Platonists.

It was rather appropriate that the exchange occurred just prior to the Transfiguration, a feast replete with Christian Platonist themes.  In his sermon 'Our Conversation is in Heaven' (1651), Whichcote unfolds our participation in the Transfiguration.

Here in this world, there is the salvation of grace, which for the substance, is the same with the salvation of glory. Spiritual life is always before eternal life ... 'At the appearing of' our Saviour Jesus Christ, the apostle saith, he 'brought life and immortality to light'. In the world to come, things are carried on, but are set on foot here. One is put into a heavenly state, when he is brought to know God, to fear him, to love him, and to obey him. One is put into a heavenly state, when in regard of the temper and disposition of his mind, he is come to be reconciled to God, and to agree with him, to delight in his ways, and walk with him; when men are taken off from carnality, and worldliness, and self-will, they are truly saved when they are thus transformed. Men have false notions, and estimate things by wrong measures, when they think heaven comes barely by a change of place, and not by alteration of temper and disposition ...

[I]f our conversation be in heaven, then religion is a thing of a great name, and powerful effect. Religion is not so slight a thing as a naked profession, or a bare denomination. Glorious things are reported in scripture of religion: It hath deservedly a very great name in the world; for see what effects religion doth attain  through a man's religion, he is an habitation of God, through the spirit a man is made a temple of the Holy Ghost, a man is made partaker of the divine nature, and as here in the text, his conversation is in heaven. Wherefore, if we profess religion, let us do such things, by virtue of the spirit of religion, which others can neither do, nor counterfeit, that men may say that God is in us, of a truth; and let the world have evidence and experiment, that religion in us is reason, and signifies something, by our transformation, and transfiguration, and heavenly conversation; let men have experience of the fruits of our religion.

From The Works of Benjamin Whichcote, Volume II. 

(The painting is Caspar David Friedrich, 'Woman before the rising sun', c.1818.)

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